News Roundup – France Censors, Flickr, Seabeds, Live tracking

June 4, 2007

France Censors – Stefan Geens of OgleEarth is back to writing his blog after a successful launch of the Second House of Sweden (a virtual embassy for Sweden inside Second Life). Stefan notes that France has managed to insert censored imagery in the new Google Earth satellite and aerial imagery which went out on Saturday. Stefan says they are using a similar technique to the censoring in the Netherlands. Here’s an example with an image overlay from Google Maps showing what an airpor looked like before it was censored (turn off the overlay – or use the transparency slider – to compare). Also, the Chinese version of Google Earth has censored imagery as well.

Flickr – Rev Dan Catt was the first to implement an interface for Google Earth for Flickr. Something which later had something to do with his getting a job at Yahoo. Now Dan has finally re-created KML links for Google Earth. Read about it at his blog Geobloggers which includes a history of his Flickr/GE project. Here’s a sample KML file showing how you can show photos for a specific tag – e.g lightning. Look at the URL for how to change the tag to whatever you want.

Live Tracking – Magnalox has recently been adding the ability to show live tracking using PDAs, and now Simbian cell phones, to interface your GPS location. He has now enabled the ability to show your position with Magnalox (which supports many mapping interfaces including Google Maps and Google Earth). You can even insert a live-tracking Google Map into your own web page if you have a need. If you’re looking for a wide range of capabilities for a mapping application, Magnalox has some of the nicest features I’ve seen.

About Frank Taylor

Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was released. He worked in 3D graphics for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank left in 2009 to circumnavigate the earth by sailboat as part of the Tahina Expedition.

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Comments

When will the censors realize that it does little good to block out stuff on the web. In about 30 seconds I found a good satellite image of the airport near Augny, France. Here is the link:http://www.fallingrain.com/world/FR/0/Augny.html
And it is a Google image!

Re magnalox’ live tracking:
There is a magnalox user who published his live tracked 4-day motorbike tour through the Alps (Germany, Swizerland, Austria, Italy).
You can follow the trip online, more infos and map here:http://www.magnalox.net/index.php?pg=7#101355
Most other users don’t publish their tracks.
Have fun
Volker

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